General Chat

"Some say the heart is just like a wheel
When you bend it, you can't mend it
But the love of fellow men is like a sinking ship
And that ship is sinking in mid-ocean.
When harm is done no love can be won
Though it happens, frequently."
Ronstadt, adapted.

Goebbels knew exactly what he was doing by separating the Jews from the rest of the German population by making them "Others" with less and less protection from the law yet also subject to draconian laws which did not affect everybody else, "Ordinary" people. From the opening of the first concentration camp in Dachau 1934 the definition of "Others" was gradually widened. By 1938 Hitler felt secure enough to carry out the infamous Kristallnacht on November 10, 1938.

It is a very well researched aspect of human psychology that once a group of people has been categorised as "Other" then feeling and sympathy for them evaporate. There was only very limited opposition to the policy of extermination of others in Germany. Thet the camps existed was well known by the general population. It was also well known by the UK Govt from the get go.

Today we can see the "Other" policy being implemented in the USA by Trump's neo fascist administration. Recently Ch4 aired an excellent series based on Philip K Dick ( Blade Runner, Minority Report) "Dreams of Electric Sheep". One of the episodes was that of "Kill All Others"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suE6iddxLF4

It is the basis of the thinking behind Teresa May's "Hostile Environment" policy which has already caused a lot of unjust suffering e.g. the Windrush and Chagos Island debacles. There are currently 10 "Detention Centres" where people can be ( and are ) held for indefinite periods without trial. Currently they hold about 3 000 "Others". Priti Patel ( herself daughter of an E Asian immigrant ) intends to beef up "Hostile Environment" which will include EU citizens post Brexit.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/oct/11/life-in-a-uk-immigration-removal-centre-worse-than-prison-as-criminal-sentence

I don't know about that David! I think a vast majority of fighting men either agreed with this policy or at best turned a blind eye, which lets face it, which one of us wouldn't when the consequences for your family and friends would be so horrendous at the slightest dissent?!
I don't think you can compare Hitler and Merkels time in office, when one devastated the country while the latter led it to success?!!

It is assuring to think that the vast majority of Geman men fighting the Allies

would want NOTHING to do with the running of those camps.

Also Angela Merkel has ran Germany longer than Adolph Hitler had the job.

I cant watch anything on that subject :-( :-(

It makes me feel ill :-( :-(

I watched it again, and had forgotten how much it got to me.
I was in tears at end - again
Liz

There are newsreel documentries of the Allies liberating concentration
Eienhoer is pictured at one of them.
The US and UK and Germany ought to have been aware of these camps,
there had been several in Germany and Poland since the mid 30's :-0

I wouldn't even try to watch a film like that. Too much.

I didn't watch it this time, but have several times, along with The Pianist ( the scene where the family is about to be taken, and they cut the sweet to share as a final meal is so simple but hard to watch, somehow almost more so than what follows.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jnV6fJXZtk

It could not have happened if the anti-Semitism was not already ingrained. Hitler first wrote that he would rid the country of the "bacteria". "As early as 1919 Adolf Hitler had written, “Rational anti-Semitism, however, must lead to systematic legal opposition.…Its final objective must unswervingly be the removal of the Jews altogether.”

That is what worries me about the rise of anti-Semitism, and racism generally in this country and others. Find a scapegoat for all the ills of a country and it is only a few very small steps to repeating the Holocaust.

One particular piece of news reel that came out of Russia after the fall of the Berlin wall sticks in my mind to this day. I was at college at the time and a fellow student ( much younger who had not seen the documentaries that I had) said he had imagined that the Jews who were taken to concentration camp would look 'different' to the ordinary population ( ie that they would be orthodox and dressed accordingly, noticeably 'Jewish' ). The camera focused for a few seconds on a little fair haired girl of about 5 maybe. She would not have survived the day I imagine.

It boggles belief that a warring nation (Germany) should a thug like Adold Hitler as their Chancellor. That hundreds of intelligent Golonels and Generals should be subservient to a former WWI Corporal. That intelligent (?) men should design and construct forced labour and extermination camps.That they shoulsd so dehumanise some of the inmates (whose only crime is their religion) that they will empty the gas chambers and cremate the corpses.

Such a camp in Sobidor (sp?) Poland had many prisoner successfully escape.
Himler closed the camp down and the site surrounded by trees

I started to watch this film years ago but I
could not cope so OH had to turn it off.
I have never tried watching it again.

I have however watched the documentaries on
TV channels.

That film made a huge impression on me when I saw it and it ranks as one of the top films I have watched. It was the graphic details like the mountain of spectacles, the silence after they would enter the gas chamber that sent your imagination and realisation into overdrive at the scale of the horror and was so upsetting.

I think it is seeing the portrayal of living beings Maggie and the fearful expressions on faces, things like that.

All those war films depicting genocide are upsetting Maggie. But the Yesterday

channel on TV much more so. They document it, no fiction.

I've just watched 'Schindler's List'. Not for the first time.
Again I was in tears - yet I managed to write an essay on the book when I was at Uni in the 1990's.
Is it seeing these people represented as living beings that 'gets' me?